ACCOUNTING FOR MANAGEMENT IN COST OF LIVESTOCK DISEASE STUDIES

Assessing the impacts of livestock disease on productivity is enhanced when the management abilities of producers are taken into consideration. One method of doing this is to develop a management index of several production/marketing practices using correspondence analysis which can combine several practices into a few variables. Also, through correspondence analysis herds can be divided into better managed and more poorly managed herds to test the association of management on herd health, productivity, and profitability.Farm Management,

Plant communities of Italy. The vegetation prodrome

The Vegetation Prodrome of Italy was promoted in 2012 by the Italian "Ministry of Environment, Land and Sea Protection", in collaboration with the "Italian Society of Botany", to provide a comprehensive and systematic catalogue and description of Italian plant communities. The Prodrome that is presented in this paper is the first full organic synthesis of the vegetation of Italy at the alliance syntaxonomic level. It fulfils several needs, the main one being a unified and comprehensive national framework that may make an important contribution to the definition of the European Vegetation Prodrome. Syntaxonomy, as well as taxonomy, is sometimes based on considerations that may in part diverge: several authors tend to favour models that are divisive or aggregative to a greater or lesser extent in terms of flora, biogeography and ecology. These different points of view stimulate the scientific debate and allow the adoption of a framework that is more widely supported. The Prodrome includes 75 classes, 2 subclasses, 175 orders, 6 suborders and 393 alliances. The classes were grouped into nine broad categories according to structural, physiognomic and synecological elements rather than to syntaxonomic criteria. The rank, full valid name, any synonymies and incorrect names are provided for each syntaxon. The short declaration highlights the physiognomy, synecology, syndynamics and distribution of the plant communities that belong to the syntaxon. The Prodrome of the Italian Vegetation is linked to the European Strategy for Biodiversity, the European Habitats Directive and the European Working Groups related to the ecosystems and their services. In addition to basic applications, the Prodrome can be used as a framework for scientific research related to the investigation of the relationships between plant communities and the environmental factors that influence their composition and distribution

David Duncan Wallace Papers - Accession 333

The David Duncan Wallace Papers consist of microfiche copies of the original David D. Wallace family papers, 1866-1951, SCHS 1233.00 held at the South Carolina Historical Society.David Duncan Wallace (1874-1951) was a Professor of History at Wofford College from 1899 through 1947 and was the author of the three volume set titled, History of South Carolina published in 1934. He is considered one of the foremost historians in State. The papers consist of his correspondence, research notes, clippings, and published and unpublished manuscripts related to his publications and areas of research. Also, included is some ephemera and other items.https://digitalcommons.winthrop.edu/manuscriptcollection_findingaids/1417/thumbnail.jp

Causal Dependence Tree Approximations of Joint Distributions for Multiple Random Processes

We investigate approximating joint distributions of random processes with causal dependence tree distributions. Such distributions are particularly useful in providing parsimonious representation when there exists causal dynamics among processes. By extending the results by Chow and Liu on dependence tree approximations, we show that the best causal dependence tree approximation is the one which maximizes the sum of directed informations on its edges, where best is defined in terms of minimizing the KL-divergence between the original and the approximate distribution. Moreover, we describe a low-complexity algorithm to efficiently pick this approximate distribution.Comment: 9 pages, 15 figure

The LisbOn KInetics Boltzmann solver

LisbOn KInetics Boltzmann (LoKI-B) is an open-source simulation tool available at: https://github.com/IST-Lisbon/LoKIThe LisbOn KInetics Boltzmann (LoKI-B) is an open-source simulation tool (https://github.com/IST-Lisbon/LoKI) that solves a time and space independent form of the two-term electron Boltzmann equation, for non-magnetised non-equilibrium low-temperature plasmas excited by DC/HF electric fields from different gases or gas mixtures. LoKI-B was developed as a response to the need of having an electron Boltzmann solver easily addressing the simulation of the electron kinetics in any complex gas mixture (of atomic/molecular species), describing first and second-kind electron collisions with any target state (electronic, vibrational and rotational), characterized by any user-prescribed population. LoKI-B includes electron-electron collisions, it handles rotational collisions adopting either a discrete formulation or a more convenient continuous approximation, and it accounts for variations in the number of electrons due to non-conservative events by assuming growth models for the electron density. On input, LoKI-B defines the operating work conditions, the distribution of populations for the electronic, vibrational and rotational levels of the atomic/molecular gases considered, and the relevant sets of electron-scattering cross sections obtained from the open-access website LXCat (http://lxcat.net/). On output, it yields the isotropic and the anisotropic parts of the electron distribution function (the former usually termed the electron energy distribution function), the electron swarm parameters, and the electron power absorbed from the electric field and transferred to the different collisional channels. LoKI-B is developed with flexible and upgradable object-oriented programming under MATLAB (R), to benefit from its matrix-based architecture, adopting an ontology that privileges the separation between tool and data. This topical review presents LoKI-B and gives examples of results obtained for different model and real gases, verifying the tool against analytical solutions, benchmarking it against numerical calculationThis work was funded by Portuguese FCT-Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia, under projects UID/FIS/50010/2013 and PTDC/FISPLA/1243/2014 (KIT-PLASMEBA)

Refined Strong Converse for the Constant Composition Codes

A strong converse bound for constant composition codes of the form $P_{e}^{(n)} \geq 1- A n^{-0.5(1-E_{sc}'(R,W,p))} e^{-n E_{sc}(R,W,p)}$ is established using the Berry-Esseen theorem through the concepts of Augustin information and Augustin mean, where $A$ is a constant determined by the channel $W$, the composition $p$, and the rate $R$, i.e., $A$ does not depend on the block length $n$.Comment: 7 page